There was every reason to assume that Elon Musk would vote for and potentially endorse Donald Trump during the 2024 election season. By the time the campaign entered its summer stretch, the tech billionaire had already spent months posting on X, his social media platform, about his slide to the political right and fears of a “woke mind virus.” But it was not until Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, that Musk felt compelled to formally announce his allegiance to the candidate.
“I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” he posted on Twitter, sharing the video of a bloodied Trump raising his fist as Secret Service agents pulled him offstage.
What followed was a truly wild year in the life of a brash election megadonor, one that would see Musk become a key campaign surrogate, then “First Buddy,” and finally a special government employee overseeing a new, unaccountable commission empowered to destroy federal agencies. Along the way, he got in explosive fights with Trump advisers, handed out million-dollar checks to voters in a shameless influence campaign, was sued for paternity by a far-right influencer, and provoked a worldwide wave of protests against his electric vehicle company, Tesla. Eventually, mounting frictions in D.C. (possibly worsened by Musk’s dismal polling numbers) led to a spectacular blowup between Trump and Musk, with the spurned oligarch vowing to use his fortune to found a third party. Could it have gone any other way, or is there some alternate timeline in which the pair effectively governed together? In ours, at least, there was only the triumph of a stunning election victory — followed by pure dysfunction.
Going full MAGA
In the wake of his initial endorsement, Musk was riding high. He had quietly set up his Super PAC, America PAC, in the months prior with anchor donations from friends in Silicon Valley, and his public MAGA turn emboldened other wealthy industry players to back Trump as well. (Trump’s cynical embrace of cryptocurrency further helped to funnel their money his way.) Musk would dump around a quarter of a billion dollars into his own Super PAC between July and the end of the election.
Musk’s stumping for Trump consisted of two main themes: freedom of speech and demonization of migrants. On the newly rechristened X, he spread conspiracy theories, claiming that millions of noncitizens were registered to vote, and continued to repeat the falsehood that Democrats were importing these individuals to commit fraud at the ballot box. Like Trump, he stoked fears about immigrants committing violent crime. His views on border security grew so rabid that they raised questions about whether he, originally a citizen of South Africa and Canada, had at one point worked illegally in the U.S. before being naturalized in 2002. (He denied such reports.)
The world’s richest man also made it a point to appear alongside Trump for rallies and in TV interviews, where he routinely revealed himself to be a stammering and unexciting public speaker. His first on-stage appearance with Trump — a triumphant return to Butler, Pennsylvania, in October — was most memorable for the cringeworthy way he jumped around with his hands in the air, perhaps expecting similar liveliness from the crowd. “I’m dark MAGA,” he said as he commenced his speech, referring to his black MAGA hat. He predicted that if Trump didn’t win, “this will be the last election.”
Paying for votes?
But Musk drew more attention in the final weeks of the race with daily $1 million giveaways for voters in a handful of battleground states, a scheme that prompted legal challenges which remain ongoing amid accusations that America PAC ran an illegal lottery. Signing a generic “Petition in Favor of Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms” as a registered voter in one of those states supposedly entered one in the sweepstakes. Participants were also to receive $47 — and later $100 — for each person they got to sign. Plaintiffs for subsequent lawsuits claim they never received those payments. Musk’s own lawyers revealed right before Election Day that the $1 million grand prize winners, some of whom received checks from Musk himself at rally events, were “not chosen at random” as advertised, but specifically selected.
None of the ethical concerns about this unprecedented infusion of personal wealth into U.S. politics seemed to matter. Trump was cruising to an easy victory on Nov. 5, 2024, carrying every swing state. Musk was characteristically smug that evening. “Game, set and match,” he posted on X, without waiting for broadcasters to project Trump’s win over Vice President Kamala Harris.
‘First Buddy’
Team Trump had been ready to torch Musk for costing them the election if it had gone the other way. Instead, they found themselves stuck with what one campaign official called a “very strange man,” who was now calling himself the “First Buddy.” Musk became a permanent fixture at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, frequently bragging about how America PAC and X had secured him a second term. The billionaire’s self-important attitude and close involvement on Trump’s calls with foreign leaders and discussions of cabinet appointments caused rifts with the president-elect’s inner circle, and led to at least one “massive blowup” over dinner with an adviser whose staffing recommendations he had challenged.
At the same time, Musk was plotting what he envisioned as his landmark achievement within a second Trump administration: the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, named to give the acronym “DOGE,” in reference to an old Reddit meme that gave rise to a crypto coin that Musk has invested in. Trump announced in a statement that Musk and another ally in the business world, Vivek Ramaswamy, would head the group, assigned to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” He added that DOGE could “become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.”
Yet Musk’s adaptation to Trumpworld faced setbacks. For one thing, there were already policy disagreements: the hardliner anti-immigrant MAGA faithful erupted in a furor when Musk and Ramaswamy said that the U.S. needed to maintain a robust H-1B visa program for skilled workers from abroad in order for Silicon Valley firms to thrive, since there weren’t enough “super motivated” and “super talented engineers” in America.
New Year’s Day brought an ominous omen for the Musk-Trump bromance. In Las Vegas, a 37-year-old military veteran died by suicide in a Tesla Cybertruck outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, shooting himself before firework mortars and gas canisters in the rented vehicle exploded, injuring bystanders. The burning Cybertruck next to a Trump-branded property proved an instantly indelible image of what 2025 had in store. Musk, however, argued that the truck’s stainless steel paneling had “saved lives,” and that the blast was “good advertising.”
DOGE demolition
On Inauguration Day in January, Musk scandalized the nation — except for its right-wing extremists — when he threw up a straight-armed salute during a post-inauguration rally. Musk spent the next weeks and months continuing to deny any Nazi or white supremacist sympathies, even as he continued to boost the German political party Alternative für Deutschland, which has ties to neo-Nazis and has been designated as extreme-right by German intelligence. Just days after the salute, in a video address to an AfD gathering, Musk said Germany had placed “too much of a focus on past guilt,” evidently referring to contrition over the Holocaust.
The ascendance of DOGE was as swift as it was chaotic. Musk had forced Ramaswamy out before Trump was even back in office, and he set to stacking the organization with loyal lieutenants plucked out of his sprawling corporate empire, as well as a cadre of inexperienced youths with backgrounds in coding and AI. One of these programmers resigned after reports about his racist hate speech in social media posts, but Musk, with support from Vice President J.D. Vance, got him reinstated. (In a minor and more amusing subplot around this same time, Musk also admitted that he was paying people to level up his characters in the video games Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2, creating the false impression that he was a globally top-ranked player in both titles.)
As DOGE worked its way into crucial elements of the administrative state that control budgets and payment processing, it shuttered the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), paused the work of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), and targeted the Department for Veterans Affairs and other agencies for massive cuts, inviting federal employees to take a buyout to quit and simply firing tens of thousands without cause. As the mouthpiece of the commission, he declared that it was maximally transparent while it dodged any meaningful oversight, telling outrageous lies about dead people receiving Social Security checks and how $50 million of foreign aid money had been earmarked to supply condoms to Gaza. (In a typical embellishment, Trump later claimed the contraceptives were for the militant group Hamas.) Lawsuits against DOGE and legal challenges to its activities multiplied at tremendous speed.
‘I am become meme’
Meanwhile, Musk casually confessed to horrifying mistakes, such as accidentally cutting funds for USAID’s Ebola prevention program, and instituted tedious management gimmicks, the most infamous being an automated Friday email to federal employees asking them to list five accomplishments for the week — or be terminated. Once that email address leaked, people flooded it with spam and crude insults. It does not appear anyone ever read the actual responses from workers, and the routine gradually died out. DOGE offered a public tally of the “waste, fraud, and abuse” it had slashed from taxpayer expenditure, but it was riddled with errors, and the team frequently had to delete billions in supposed savings.
Yet Musk still somehow found time for personal beef. There was the February incident in which he flipped out on an astronaut who corrected his lie that Americans stuck aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for months had been abandoned for “political reasons,” firing back, “You are fully retarded.” That very same day, the musician Grimes, his ex-partner, posted on X out of desperation, saying he would not reply to her private messages about an “urgent” medical crisis one of their three children was experiencing. This followed a surprise statement on X from the right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair, who said she had given birth to a child allegedly fathered by Musk, adding to his already significant brood by way of three other women. (Musk, often warning of falling birth rates, is an outspoken and active pronatalist.) Without an acknowledgement of the child from Musk, St. Clair sued for paternity and custody. The filing includes alleged text exchanges in which Musk told her they had “a legion of kids to make.”
A bizarre appearance at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference in February around this time, Musk wore sunglasses, waved around a symbolic chainsaw that he said would cut through bureaucracy, and stumbled inarticulately through an interview, at one point declaring, “I am become meme.” (Months afterward, he expressed regret over the stunt, acknowledging on X that Argentinian president Javier Miliei “gave me the chainsaw backstage and I ran with it, but in retrospect, it lacked empathy.”) His off-putting mannerisms at CPAC renewed speculation about his recreational drug use, particularly the dissociative anesthetic ketamine, which had been reported on in The Wall Street Journal a year prior. In May, the New York Times reported that Musk had told people on the campaign trail that his ketamine habit had affected his bladder; he denied this, insisting he had not taken ketamine for years.
Tesla is tanking
DOGE backlash and dramas of Musk’s own making — like his amplification of an X post arguing that “public sector workers,” not Adolf Hitler, were responsible for the Holocaust — took its toll on Tesla, a brand virtually synonymous with his name. Though the car company and SpaceX, his rocket company, were enjoying reprieves from regulatory woes as DOGE dismantled the agencies that enforced fines and penalties against them, a “Tesla Takedown” movement had taken shape, with tens of thousands around the world protesting at dealerships, pushing for owners to sell their cars and investors to unload their shares. Tesla drivers bought up countless anti-Musk bumper stickers, and some even disguised the make of their cars, looking to avoid having their vehicles spay-painted with swastikas by vandals. Sales plummeted. A rash of violent attacks on Tesla properties prompted the administration to claim they would treat such acts as “domestic terrorism.” In March, as Tesla stock slumped, Trump, in a stunning display of cronyism, invited him to demo several models in the White House driveway, ultimately buying a Model S Plaid for himself. Still, by May, the Tesla board was reportedly considering replacing Musk as CEO. He reacted to the news with indignant fury.
Musk’s increasing unpopularity grew harder to ignore. The assault on the federal government, the blatant conflicts of interest, the embarrassing failures of his ventures (there have been four consecutive explosions of SpaceX rockets this year, some of them raining debris over the Caribbean and diverting flights), and his endless, aggressive posting on X had made him a resolutely toxic figure. In his first attempt at political kingmaking since the 2024 election, Musk shoveled $20 million in America PAC money into a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, reviving his $1 million giveaways and speaking to voters in a Cheesehead hat as he made the case for the Republican candidate. Wisconsinites roundly rejected his message, with the Democrat clinching the seat by a wide margin. Weeks later, perhaps deflated by the resounding loss, Musk said, “I think in terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future.”
Troubles with Trump
Throughout his tenure in D.C., Musk’s spats with rival Trump officials came to be common knowledge. One senior official told Rolling Stone that Musk was “just the most irritating person I’ve ever had to deal with.” He bickered over disagreements with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Longtime Trump surrogate Steve Bannon routinely attacked him. Musk denounced Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro as “truly a moron,” “dumber than a sack of bricks,” and “Peter Retarrdo.” A screaming match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly turned physical when Musk body-checked him, and the brawl had to be broken up by witnesses. Adviser Sergio Gor, another Musk hater, persuaded Trump to withdraw Musk’s favored nominee to lead NASA, hastening their messy split. While Musk had faithful underlings at DOGE, it looked as if he had no friends in the White House apart from — for a while, anyway — Trump himself.
That relationship, too, began to crumble as Musk reached the end of the 130-day period he was allowed to serve as a “special government employee” in his work at DOGE. Musk denied that they were parting ways when he read headlines relating how Trump had privately told people he would be leaving the administration soon; in public, Trump remained coy about how long Musk might stay but hinted that the CEO might want to return his focus to his various businesses. All of it led to a muted farewell ceremony in the Oval Office on May 30, officially Musk’s last day in government. Standing by the president’s side with a black eye that he said was from his young son punching him in the face, Musk received a ceremonial key and thanks from the president, who cautioned that he was “not really leaving.” He had launched DOGE with the promise to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, though to date, it claims just $190 billion in savings — less than 10 percent of that amount.
It then emerged that right before their last presser together, Trump had learned that Jason Isaacman, Musk’s pick to head NASA — a position of utmost importance to him given the agency’s contracts with SpaceX — had previously donated to the campaigns of Democratic politicians. Trump confronted Musk after the cameras were off, and that same day, withdrew Isaacman’s nomination, a humiliating blow to Musk on his way out.
All-out enemies
In the end, of course, it came down to money. Trump had mustered all his political capital to get the tax and spending measure he called his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” poised to further enrich the wealthy and strip healthcare from millions of Americans, passed in Congress. By early June, Musk was ready to let rip, and posted on X that the bill was a “disgusting abomination,” since it would increase the national deficit by trillions. As he sought to convince lawmakers to vote against it, Trump noted that he was “very disappointed” in Musk. He speculated that Musk was angry that the bill would end an electric vehicle mandate, ending a tax credit incentive for customers who buy Teslas.
Musk went nuclear, first asserting that without his help, Trump would have lost the election. “Such ingratitude,” he wrote during an hours-long tantrum on X. He then alleged that Trump, for many years a friend of Jeffrey Epstein, was named in government-held files related to the late sex trafficker, and that this was why his Justice Department was not releasing them. Trump called Musk “CRAZY” and mulled his options to “terminate” his companies’ government contracts. The following week, Musk deleted the Epstein posts, saying they “went too far.”
The damage was clearly done, however. Trump signaled that he didn’t care to patch things up and warned of “serious consequences” for Musk if he continued to meddle in the congressional debate over the tax bill. Musk nonetheless vowed to ensure that anyone who “campaigned on reducing government spending” but voted for the measure would lose to a primary challenger in their next election cycle. “What the heck was the point of @DOGE,” he wondered on X, if the administration was going to increase the debt anyway?”
As Trump bashed Musk in the media, advisers who had rankled at Musk’s presence in their midst since the 2024 campaign eagerly discussed angles for revenge, like restarting the paused regulatory investigations into Musk’s corporations and pressuring MAGA brass to side with Trump in the feud. Bannon suggested a more direct approach, telling the president to investigate his former adviser as an “illegal alien.” Ahead of passage and signing of the contentious bill over Fourth of July weekend, Trump posted on Truth Social that “without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa.” Asked by a reporter if he would deport Musk, Trump said “we’ll have to take a look,” and floated the idea of siccing DOGE itself on Musk’s contracts.
An embittered Musk went on to revisit the topic of Epstein in July, seething along with scores of prominent right-wingers over a joint FBI and Justice Department memo that effectively closed the case with no further disclosures. As the MAGA base called for Attorney General Pam Bondi to be fired and the administration fell to vicious infighting, he kept hammering at this weak spot. “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?” he asked on X.
A new party
Once the tax bill became law, Musk, apparently resigned to his breakup with Trump, announced that he was founding a new political party, the America Party, since he had run a poll on X in which a majority of respondents were in favor. “The America Party is needed to fight the Republican/Democrat Uniparty,” he posted. Only a week before the one-year anniversary of his Trump endorsement, he was committing to a movement that could potentially leech votes from the GOP in future elections.
A reasonable person might take a moment to reflect on whether any of this spectacle was worth it. In the space of a dozen months, Musk has alienated the liberals who ordinarily buy his cars, galvanized activists against the American oligarchy he represents, made himself into a traitor in the eyes of the MAGA rank-and-file, courted the ire of cabinet members and top White House lieutenants, humiliated himself with the bungled DOGE assault while making enemies of virtually the entire apparatus of federal administration, helped spread hate speech and misinformation on his poorly managed social media site (whose CEO just resigned), revealed that Tesla is far behind in the self-driving robotaxi race, and overseen the development of an AI chatbot that recently identified itself as “MechaHitler.” If he can draw anyone into the America Party besides a smattering of diehard fanboys inclined to dismiss his every misstep, it would be a miraculous achievement.
Those acolytes have a saying: “Never bet against Elon.” It’s true that with his immense wealth and cultish followers, Musk has withstood plenty of scandals and many, many screwups, increasing his fortune and his power over political discourse. But the wins scored with his turbulent entry into cutthroat Beltway affairs came at extraordinary cost. Would he do it differently, given the chance? It’s probably not the right question to ask about Musk, creature of relentless impulse that he is. More relevant by far is whatever he’ll do next.
